About

About the blog

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About me

Practical Electronics May 1978

I’ve been interested in electronics since I was a kid (and as you can see, that’s over half a century ago). I played around with radios, amps and logic as a teen, even making my own equipment for a disco that a group of us ran for years. For a while, I took to photography (I think that is fairly common with electronics enthusiasts) and with the advent of digital cameras I’ve been able to make great use of those skills.

Back to electronics: Check the photos – Practical Electronics May 1978 was one of my first teetering steps to getting published, a simple device but a good beginning in a great UK magazine. Coincidentally that edition featured an ad for the Commodore PET computer.

Practical Electronics May 1978

That was just the beginning. Somewhat later in 1981, my first finy financial success with this hobby which by now had mutated to include writing software and I’d become a fan of a US publication: David H Ahl’s CREATIVE COMPUTING.

January 1981 – my first small cheque from the above – nothing significant but it made me very happy. A simple binary tree response program.

By the 1980s, I’d moved on to writing for the then prestigious “Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia” – which then mutated to just “Dr Dobbs Journal”.

I still have the November 1981 edition in perfect condition – and noted only today that someone is selling a later issue on Amazon for £80, would you believe.

In January 1981 I had a massive article printed in Dr Dobbs and later, with a professional background in engineering, I became a fan of Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar and built my own (wired) home control (pre-IOT) and at the same time took up electronics full-time by going into business, helping to design the “world’s first video jukebox”.

My first stop was providing tech support for our product at the World’s Fair at Tokyo, Japan and from there I helped design all sorts of systems using microprocessors which took me all over the EU and to America where I met the woman who became my wife. I took an interest in MS Windows late 1992 and have used it almost every day since then, pretty much avoiding Linux until 2015 with the launch of the Raspberry Pi Model 2 when it made sense to take an interest in Raspbian (Debian) – I’ve since learned about OpenWrt, Armbian and related tools…

Just after the turn of the century I took on the role of National IT Chairman (and board director) of the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses – a role I managed for 14 years during which time I often travelled around the UK and the EU which meant I had less time for my favourite subject of electronics but that didn’t stop me blogging about new and interesting stuff – and of course given my role, I got to visit the HQ offices of the likes of Microsoft in Seattle and the UK and also Brussels, Dell (Ireland), Google (Ireland and Brussels) and others to talk about business IT and see their latest innovations.

In 2013 I became vice-chairman of an EU project in addition to my other roles and that took me to Brussels regularly for meetings (of course enjoying the many excellent beers they have over there as well as making lots of new friends).

I am married to Maureen Scargill and have five grandchildren. Recently with various changes in our lives,  Maureen and I chose to scrap our external roles and instead spend as much time as possible in Southern Spain, away from the miserable weather in the UK  and this has given me ample time to focus on my favourite subjects, writing about tech gadgets and implementing/developing IOT home control. Spain is now our main base.

Today I can concentrate on what I do best – tinkering. Back in the ’90s our electronics company was making wired home control systems using PIC microprocessors – during which time I thoroughly enjoyed every minute designing new products – but we knew then that ultimately, wireless (preferably without countless batteries) was the way to go – at the time, the latter option was expensive.

With the advent of Arduino, the ESP8266/ESP32 and the Raspberry Pi 2,3,4,5 (and similar tiny Linux machines from FriendlyArm and others too numerous to mention) it has become relatively easy to create massively powerful home control systems – and that is just what I’m doing. Add Amazon Alexa, Google Home and similar devices – many sci-fi dreams are rapidly becoming reality.

Our home has Raspberry Pi (right now using RPi5 – had all the previous models) as central controller originally (for years) using my favourite tool “Node-Red” – now using Home Assistant as the brains and communicating over WiFi largely with MQTT – and Zigbee and I have ESP8266/ESP32 controllers all over the place doing various jobs from heating and lighting to watering system control, sound effects, mood (serial LED) lighting – you name it. You can read all about that starting at the old “Home Control 2020” blog entry as well as various other blog entries.

If you are into Facebook, please also join around 6,7k+ followers of ESPWIFI or the growing number of followers of IOTSTUFF (9.5K+). Maybe you’re more of an X (formerly known as Twitter) person?

Please do take the time to look through the posts – there are hundreds of them – and some of the reader comments in here form a superb library of helpful information. I am forever grateful to those who spend the time to come into the blog to help and advise myself and others – I’m also eternally grateful to those readers who have found the blog useful and made a small donation to help feed my Ebay/AliExpress habits – which usually results in more blog entries and….

From time to time I do product reviews, sometimes of products I have purchased, other times the products are supplied by manufacturers hopeful of a decent review. While I welcome all interesting devices arriving at my door – be aware, if it is rubbish – I WILL say so.

Once again – thanks for taking the time to register – and please – DO comment – let us have the benefit of your ideas – there’s a thriving community in here of people who love to make things.

2 thoughts on “About

  1. Hello

    The Script is wonderful

    But when The Scriptreboot
    now turns it makes a mistake. I think at line 356 the ping does not respond I tried your place address 8.8.8.8 and it works !!!

    Thanks again for the work

      I had a stroke! I do not write well: oops: !!

    1. Hi

      I have now updated the script to today’s date and changed that check to 8.8.8.8 – thanks to all. Well, stroked_papy – you are not alone – I had an ischaemic stroke in December 2017 – nature did it’s best to finish me off and didn’t stop there. After I got my driving licence back – I had an epileptic attack – 99% due to the stroke, never had anything like that before or after. All of that slowed me down for a long time – thankfully my blog users and a number of suppliers were VERY patient with me and now I’m back up and running with the aid of a little 21st century chemistry.

      I have NO idea why Antonio and I used that original address but 8.8.8.8 should be just fine. Bitbucket is updated already. I use that Google address every minute of the day (once a minute) to check (in other code) that my Vodafone router is actually connected to the outside world (thank you Google).

      Regards

      Pete

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